Paper Towns — Chapter no 24

24.

Even though we only had a week before finals, I spent Monday afternoon

reading “Song of Myself.” I’d wanted to go to the last two pseudovisions,

but Ben needed his car. I was no longer looking for clues in the poem so

much as I was looking for Margo herself. I’d made it about halfway through

“Song of Myself” this time when I stumbled into another section that I

found myself reading and rereading.

“I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,” Whitman writes.

And then for two pages, he’s just hearing: hearing a steam whistle, hearing

people’s voices, hearing an opera. He sits on the grass and lets the sound

pour through him. And this is what I was trying to do, too, I guess: to listen

to all the little sounds of her, because before any of it could make sense, it

had to be heard. For so long, I hadn’t really heard Margo—I’d seen her

screaming and thought her laughing—that now I figured it was my job. To

try, even at this great remove, to hear the opera of her.

If I couldn’t hear Margo, I could at least listen to what she once heard,

so I downloaded the album of Woody Guthrie covers. I sat at the computer,

my eyes closed, elbows against the desk, and listened to a voice singing in a

minor key. I tried to hear, inside a song I’d never heard before, the voice I

had trouble remembering after twelve days.

I was still listening—but now to another of her favorites, Bob Dylan—

when my mom got home. “Dad’s gonna be late,” she said through the

closed door. “I thought I might make turkey burgers?”

“Sounds good,” I answered, and then closed my eyes again and listened

to the music. I didn’t sit up again until Dad called me for dinner an album

and a half later.

At dinner, Mom and Dad were talking about politics in the Middle East.

Even though they completely agreed with each other, they still managed to

yell about it, saying that so-and-so was a liar, and so-and-so was a liar and a

thief, and that the lot of them should resign. I focused on the turkey burger,

which was excellent, dripping with ketchup and smothered with grilled

onions.

“Okay, enough,” my mom said after a while. “Quentin, how was your

day?”

“Fine,” I said. “Getting ready for finals, I guess.”

“I can’t believe this is your last week of classes,” Dad said. “It really

does just seem like yesterday . . .”

“It does,” Mom said. A voice in my head was like: WARNING

NOSTALGIA ALERT WARNING WARNING WARNING. Great people,

my parents, but prone to bouts of crippling sentimentality.

“We’re just very proud of you,” she said. “But, God, we’ll miss you next

fall.”

“Yeah, well, don’t speak too soon. I could still fail English.”

My mom laughed, and then said, “Oh, guess who I saw at the YMCA

yesterday? Betty Parson. She said Chuck was going to the University of

Georgia next fall. I was pleased for him; he’s always struggled.”

“He’s an asshole,” I said.

“Well,” my dad said, “he was a bully. And his behavior was deplorable.”

This was typical of my parents: in their minds, no one was just an asshole.

There was always something wrong with people other than just sucking:

they had socialization disorders, or borderline personality syndrome, or

whatever.

My mom picked up the thread. “But Chuck has learning difficulties. He

has all kinds of problems—just like anyone. I know it’s impossible for you

to see peers this way, but when you’re older, you start to see them—the bad

kids and the good kids and all kids—as people. They’re just people, who

deserve to be cared for. Varying degrees of sick, varying degrees of

neurotic, varying degrees of self-actualized. But you know, I always liked

Betty, and I always had hopes for Chuck. So it’s good that he’s going to

college, don’t you think?”

“Honestly, Mom, I don’t really care about him one way or another.” But

I did think, if everyone is such a person, how come Mom and Dad still

hated all the politicians in Israel and Palestine? They didn’t talk about them

like they were people.

My dad finished chewing something and then put his fork down and

looked at me. “The longer I do my job,” he said, “the more I realize that

humans lack good mirrors. It’s so hard for anyone to show us how we look,

and so hard for us to show anyone how we feel.”

“That is really lovely,” my mom said. I liked that they liked each other.

“But isn’t it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to

understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are?

We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.”

“True. Consciousness makes for poor windows, too. I don’t think I’d

ever thought about it quite that way.”

I was sitting back. I was listening. And I was hearing something about

her and about windows and mirrors. Chuck Parson was a person. Like me.

Margo Roth Spiegelman was a person, too. And I had never quite thought

of her that way, not really; it was a failure of all my previous imaginings.

All along—not only since she left, but for a decade before—I had been

imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as poor a

window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel

fear, who could feel isolated in a roomful of people, who could be shy about

her record collection because it was too personal to share. Someone who

might read travel books to escape having to live in the town that so many

people escape to. Someone who—because no one thought she was a person

—had no one to really talk to.

And all at once I knew how Margo Roth Spiegelman felt when she

wasn’t being Margo Roth Spiegelman: she felt empty. She felt the

unscaleable wall surrounding her. I thought of her asleep on the carpet with

only that jagged sliver of sky above her. Maybe Margo felt comfortable

there because Margo the person lived like that all the time: in an abandoned

room with blocked-out windows, the only light pouring in through holes in

the roof. Yes. The fundamental mistake I had always made—and that she

had, in fairness, always led me to make—was this: Margo was not a

miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing.

She was a girl.